Research conducted by Liverpool John Moores University on behalf of the
NHS has found that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) contribute to
poor life-course health and social outcomes. The fact that ACEs are
linked to involvement in violence, early unplanned pregnancy,
incarceration, and unemployment suggests a cyclic effect where those
with higher ACE counts have higher risks of exposing their own children
to ACEs.

Belarusian and Italian lawyers have started the cooperation in matters
of international family law, BelTA learnt from the press service of the
National Bar Association.

The National Bar Association signed an agreement with Italy’s Studio
Legale, under which the parties undertake to develop cooperation on
matters related to the rights of individuals and legal entities of
Belarus and Italy, share the analysis of background information,
teaching and research materials. The subject of the contract is also the
development of cooperation in matters concerning the development of
legislative and other normative acts, the organization of conferences
and seminars.

The Pew Research Center recently announced that mothers are the primary breadwinners in 40
percent of American households. Forty percent, in many minds, invokes
the image of an almost equal participation of moms and dads in the
workforce and at home. Commentators and media outlets have seized the
opportunity to discuss the father's domestic role and the
disproportionate impact of the recession on men. Many have viewed this
as the advancement of women in the workforce.

However, a closer look at the numbers, in conjunction with birth data,
suggests otherwise. Notably, while mothers are the primary breadwinners
in 40 percent of households, the same percentage of births are to
unmarried mothers. Although the two populations do not perfectly
overlap -- not every female breadwinner is a single mother -- they do to
a surprisingly significant extent. Specifically, 8.6 million (63
percent) of women breadwinners in the United States are single mothers.
A further analysis of the numbers reveals the startling fact that 25
percent of all breadwinners in the United States are single mothers
earning a median income of $23,000 per year.

Divorced retirees expect a £13,800 annual retirement income, compared with £16,400 for those who have not.

Divorce reduces average expected retirement income by around
£2,600 a year (16 per cent), according to a survey conducted by
Prudential. People who are planning to retire in 2013 and have been
divorced expect to retire with an annual income of £13,800 compared with
£16,400 for those who have not divorced.

The latest statistics on the marriage rate – provisional figures released by the Office for National Statistics for 2011– show that in that year the number of marriages in England and Wales increased by 1.7% to 247,890, from 243,808 in 2010.

Women’s rights advocates have long struggled for motherhood to be a
voluntary condition, and not one imposed by nature or culture. In places
where women and girls have access to affordable and safe contraception
and abortion services, and where there are programs to assist mothers in
distress find foster or adoptive parents, voluntary motherhood is
basically a reality. In many states, infant safe haven laws allow a
birth mother to walk away from her newborn baby if she leaves it
unharmed at a designated facility.

If a man accidentally conceives a child with a woman, and does not want
to raise the child with her, what are his choices? Surprisingly, he has
few options in the United States. He can urge her to seek an abortion,
but ultimately that decision is hers to make. Should she decide to
continue the pregnancy and raise the child, and should she or our
government attempt to establish him as the legal father, he can be stuck
with years of child support payments.

Do men now have less reproductive autonomy than women? Should men
have more control over when and how they become parents, as many women
now do?

...

The legal scholar Jane Murphy has argued that a new definition of
fatherhood is emerging in our laws and court decisions which privileges a
man’s biological tie to a child over other criteria. In a 2005 article
in the Notre Dame Law Review, Murphy wrote about paternity
“disestablishment” cases in which men who have assumed the father role
in a child’s life seek genetic testing to avoid the obligations of legal
fatherhood, typically when they break up with the child’s mother. Her
research shows that replacing the limited “mother’s husband” conception
of fatherhood with a narrow biologically based one still leaves many
children legally fatherless.

A man who married in secret by checking his allegedly incapacitated
bride out of a nursing home may not be entitled to her estate, the
Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruled. Nancy Ellen Laubenheimer died
at Virginia Highlands Health and Rehabilitation Center in February 2009
while her stepdaughter, Patricia Mudlaff, was petitioning for permanent
guardianship. Though Laubenheimer had never adopted Mudlaff or
her two siblings, she had been married to their father for 30 years
before his death in 2001. Laubenheimer's will in 1999 said the bulk of
her estate should go to those three children if her husband predeceased
her. Joseph McLeod moved in with Laubenheimer some time later.
Laubenheimer's failing health included a series of strokes, diabetes,
renal failure and hypertension. Six months before Laubenheimer was
judged by doctors as incapacitated and admitted to a nursing home in
October 2008, a nurse had told the sheriff's department that a man named
"Clark McLeod" was not letting Laubenheimer get the care she required. Laubenheimer
had been in the nursing home just two or three weeks when McLeod
removed her twice to obtain a marriage license and then get married at
the courthouse.

The rules on stay-at-home parents' access to credit have been reversed twice in
the past four years but, interestingly, without much media attention
along the way. This is despite the fundamental impact of the reversals
on stay-at-home parents' ability to open a card in their names or to
extend their credit lines without having a joint account with their
spouses.

In a desperate attempt to stay close to her two children, Marla
Theocharides packed her belongings and moved in April from Northern
Indiana to ­Cyprus, where her ex-husband has kept their kids for more
than two years.

On a number of occasions,
her attempts to spend time with Katerina, 7, and Marcus, 4, have been
thwarted by their father, who has denied visitation and ignored an order
from a court in South Bend that grants custody of the children to
their mother.

It’s
yet another international custody dispute, similar to that of another
Hoosier mom who traveled to Greece earlier this year in order to get
her son back. That case ended happily for Alissa Zagaris, whose son is
now with her in Noblesville.

Christy Maldonado lives in Oklahoma. This month she filed a brief
urging the Supreme Court of South Carolina to finalize her birth
daughter’s adoption by Matt and Melanie Capobianco.

In the summer of 2009, I made
the most difficult decision of my life: to place my baby, Veronica Rose,
with adoptive parents. Many know her as “Baby Girl” or “Baby Veronica” because her adoptive parents and I fought all the way to the Supreme Court for Veronica’s right to be treated like a human being — not property owned by a Native American tribe.

I am Latina and not a member of any tribe. When I became
pregnant, I was already a single mother with two children, in a
relationship that was on the rocks. I thought hard about my options and
decided I could not have an abortion. I was briefly engaged to
Veronica’s biological father, who is a member of the Cherokee Nation,
but our relationship was over by my third trimester.

In the United States, there is a competitive market in human eggs
provided for reproductive purposes. An "extraordinary" egg donor can
earn as much as $50,000 when she offers her eggs to an infertile couple.
In California, however, that same "extraordinary" individual would
receive nothing, aside from payment for her direct expenses, if she
provided those same eggs for research purposes. That could change soon.

A bill co-sponsored by four female Democratic legislators
would allow women to sell their eggs for research, just as men can sell
their sperm. But is the proposal, which has gone to the governor after
passage in both the state Senate and the Assembly, a good idea?

For at least two decades, the California family code stated that
sperm donors were not to be considered the fathers of the children they
helped conceive. That was supposed to protect both the men donating
sperm — often anonymously and for money — and the women who used it to
get pregnant but who didn't want the donor involved in the child's life.
Two years ago, the code was amended to allow an exception when the
donor and the woman had a written agreement to the contrary, signed
before conception.

But the law hasn't kept pace with advances in assisted
reproductive technology and changes in the public's perception of what
constitutes a family. Today, families are defined more broadly, and a
man is more likely to donate sperm to, say, a friend or an unmarried
girlfriend who is trying to get pregnant through artificial insemination
— and he is more likely to maintain a relationship with a child who is
subsequently born.

A bill passed by the state Senate and awaiting action in the Assembly
would smartly update the family code by giving some sperm donors legal
recourse to argue for parental rights in cases in which the mother at
first agrees and then changes her mind.

The Texas Senate gave final passage on Friday to one of the strictest
anti-abortion measures in the country, legislation championed by Gov.
Rick Perry, who rallied the Republican-controlled Legislature late last
month after a Democratic filibuster blocked the bill and intensified
already passionate resistance by abortion-rights supporters.

Two adoption agencies for young children in Tokyo received a total of
about 83 million yen in donations from adoptive parents in the three
years to fiscal 2011, it has been learned.

The two organizations
almost always asked adoptive parents to make contributions, The Yomiuri
Shimbun has found, and one entity received nearly 2 million yen for a
single case.

The Child Welfare Law prohibits arranging the
adoption of young children for profit. The Health, Labor and Welfare
Ministry has told local governments to research adoption agencies, as it
suspects that such large donations could be considered de facto
payments for these organizations’ services, a violation of the law.